“It was a really good session. You should have invited the students, so that they would sit and listen, and see the model session.” Judge of the Court of general Jurisdiction of Kentron and Nork Marash Administrative Districts Ruben Vardazaryan said after the hearing of the appeal Ruzanna Khachatryan v. the Journalist of “Hraparak” Daily Syuzanna Simonyan (Ruzanna Khachatryan is the spouse of the RA Minister of Defense Seyran Ohanyan).
Today’s session began with explanation. Advocate Lusine Hakobyan, defender of the journalist Syuzanna Simonyan’s rights said that there were some publications about the applicant’s personal life as well as the car accident itself. And these were the grounds for publication of the disputed material. The party finds that the publication was reasonable. According to Lusine Hakobyan there was a publication in “Hzham.am” website, which was made prior to this material. In addition Ruzanna Khachatryan had made a note in her Facebook page mentioning that there were some publications concerning her person and some media have referred to this notice. This fits to the framework of the concept of reasonable publication defined by ECHR. Although there are not enough proofs of the fact of that accident, but we have enough grounds to assume that we can do such publication,” the lawyer later told us.
She noted that the article referred to public importance and public events and according to her one should be tolerant towards such interests.
“The article is not targeted at the Ruzanna Khachatryan or Seyran Ohanyan. It was an article on public interest, public events and the requirement of tolerance. They came as examples: Ruzanna Khachatryan, Seyran Ohanyan, there were Bill Clinton, Carla Bruni, Angela Merkel as well. The journalist tried to introduce her thesis and to launch a public discussion,” our interlocutor said.
Karen Mezhlumyan, the applicant’s advocate had some questions to the respondent. He was interested about the availability of references in the article and asked some other questions as well. After listening the answers he concluded, “There is no proper reference. The evidence that the party has mentioned in the connection with the accident, are considered as the evidence of the author of the article. We referred to it in detail in the legal arguments. Therefore, the author of article is responsible for all that,” Mr. Mezhlumyan said.
According to the advocate, the media, which was aware about Ruzanna Khachatryan’s denials, was obliged to take measures to clarify whether the information corresponds to reality or not, and only after that publish the material. “By the way there is such a precedent of the Court of Cassation, where the respondent was again “Hraparak” Daily”, which had clarified from the party that the information did not correspond to reality, however published the material. The Court of Cassation considered that there is a violation, because clarification shall not be merely formal,” the advocate said to Iravaban.net after the court session.
On 6 November the Prosecutor General’s Office had issued a statement informing that the information published in “Haykakan Zham” online media includes false information indicating that the accident was caused by Ruzanna Khachatryan, as well as informing that the police officers abused their official powers and hid the accident. Based on these on 6 November a criminal case was initiated under the provisions of Article 333, Part 1(False crime reporting.) of the RA Criminal Code, which was sent to the RA Investigative Committee to conduct preliminary investigation.
Lusine Hakobyan referred to this circumstance and said, “They should go and study the criminal law. How can a journalistic article be viewed as a false crime reporting. If so, what is the sense of decriminalization of libel, if now the journalists will be called to criminal liability for false crime reporting. They shall just consider all such publications as false crime reporting and call the journalists to criminal liability,” said the աdvocate.
A claim was filed against the newspaper and the journalist Syuzanna Simonyan saying that an article “Public wants to know”, humiliating the person’s good reputation, dignity and honor, which actually include was published in the newspaper, which include actual inaccuracies. Mrs. Khachatryan requires deleting the publication, to compensate the damage caused and to publish confutation.
Gevorg Tosunyan
